Superstition in Retreat

Why did some prosper? They had done good in a past life, or the gods favored them.

But others were too curious to take “magic” for an answer. Despite error and opposition, they each played their own small part in unweaving the rainbow, and many found the truth inside more beautiful than the mystery.

But astronomers predicted eclipses the witch doctors could not, and doctors healed those the priests could not. After much resistance, the supernaturalists gave up the motion of stars and planets to physics. Later, they gave up disease to germs and viruses. They gave up élan vital to biology and biochemistry. They gave up mental illness to neuropsychology. Magical explanations shrank from the light of science: superstition in retreat.

It is in the dark corners of human ignorance—cosmic origins, consciousness, intelligence—that magical thinking festers. William James held it in contempt:

When one turns to the magnificent edifice of the physical sciences, and sees how it was reared; what thousands of disinterested moral lives of men lie buried in its mere foundations; what patience and postponement, what choking down of preference, what submission to the icy laws of outer fact are wrought into its very stones and mortar . . . then how besotted and contemptible seems every little sentimentalist who comes blowing his voluntary smoke-wreaths, and pretending to decide things from out of his private dream!2

Even scientists and reductionists can be caught in magical thinking, for we all have cached thoughts; the human brain doesn’t automatically propagate belief updates throughout its entire web of beliefs. Thus you can catch a neuroscientist saying that consciousness will turn out to not be made of atoms. Thus you catch psychologists saying that humans may yet have contra-causal free will, unlike every other animal and in contradiction to the laws of physics.

Thus, you can catch philosophers saying that machines cannot think, computer scientists acting as if human intelligence represents an upper bound on intelligence, and AI researchers thinking that machines will only become more benevolent as they become smarter.

Let us turn to just one of these—the idea that human “general” intelligence is special, and cannot be duplicated by a machine—and observe superstition in retreat.

It’s true that there are many things machines cannot yet do, but those who use these facts to defend the unreachable specialness of human intelligence remind me of those who point to the mysteries of consciousness or cosmic origins to defend the existence of God. It’s a losing battle.

Yes, writing novels and doing science feel like things that only humans can do, because in four billion years of life on Earth only humans have ever done it. But remember: for 99.99995% of that history, no species wrote novels or did science. In hindsight, it will look like the human brain was the first of many mind architectures that could write novels and do science, and only by an inconsequential margin of a few thousand years.

In fact, the “doing science” task is already being handed to machines. In 2009 a robot named Adam was programmed with our scientific knowledge about yeast, and then posed its own hypotheses, tested them, assessed the results, and made original scientific discoveries.4 The same team is now working on an even more powerful AI scientist named Eve.5

AI is coming. It must come, if scientific progress continues, because intelligence (efficient cross-domain optimization) runs on information processing, and human meat is not the only platform for information processing. This is why we can build machines to play chess, compose music, and do science, and it is why we can also create human-level “general” machine intelligence.